A new monster for fantasy fans

Dinosaurs are the best-known prehistoric animals, but long after they died out, the Earth was populated by some pretty strange-looking creatures, going by paleontological discoveries in Africa. These included hippo-like elephant relatives, pig-like hippo ancestors and horse-like ancient kin of the hyrax rodent. Clearly, many animals were ‘transitioning’, as they say, back in ancient Africa. So, the discovery of a hypercarnivorous (strictly non-veg) ‘hyaenodont’ mammal with gigantic, terrifyingly pointy pearly-whites that roamed the Earth with other Miocene creatures in Kenya 23 million to 5 million years ago, comes as no surprise. Unfortunately, for all its intriguing physical attributes, it has been given a rather misleadingly cute name — Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. It means ‘big lion’ in Swahili, but the 1.5-tonne creature larger than a modern polar bear was no ancestor of Simba, The Lion King; in fact, it wasn’t any kind of cat at all.

As it apparently looks like it was transitioning between rhino, hyena and wolf, palaeontologists should have considered naming it after J R R Tolkien’s sharp-toothed ‘warg’ of Lord of the Rings, which would also link it to the similarly named transitioning creatures of George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones. A future role for it in a book, movie, TV series or video game may then have been guaranteed.